


Drowned Flesh and Bone

by Teyke



Category: Dishonored (Video Games), Fallen London | Echo Bazaar
Genre: Fusion, Gen, Other cities that should be sold to the Bazaar, Rats, Seeking Mr Eaten's Name (Fallen London)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-16
Updated: 2020-07-16
Packaged: 2021-03-04 19:48:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,325
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25301872
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Teyke/pseuds/Teyke
Summary: The bars of his cell bend. Prisoners are screaming. And above it all he can hear—wings, a million beating wings, and the long slow sound of a whale's dying scream.The stones of the prison fall. The water rushes in. Dunwall sinks beneath the waves.
Comments: 8
Kudos: 20





	1. Corvo

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this ages ago, back when I was Seeking, and then totally forgot to post it here! ...Mostly because I'd intended to write a third part, with Emily, but then that never happened and at this point I think it never will. So instead have a two-part fic with Corvo and Daud and a lot of bad Seeking-related decisions.

On his third day in Coldridge, the prison shakes. Corvo doesn't notice it at first: he's shaking himself, fresh off a new bout of torture, the first without Burrows there to oversee. Without him there, cajoling for a confession every two minutes, the Royal Torturer had been free to get creative. But when the torturer is done with him and they've thrown him back in his cell, all he has for company is Emily's screams and Jessamine's pleading.

When the shaking grows too strong for him to miss, it's already too late. Gunshots echo through the prison, only it's not gunshots, it's stone shattering, twisting. The bars of his cell bend. Prisoners are screaming. And above it all he can hear—wings, a million beating wings, and the long slow sound of a whale's dying scream.

A crack forms in the wall of his cell, the sound of it deafening him. Corvo lunges for it, and then the world falls in. Gravity goes sideways. He teeters for balance, nearly loses a hand to shearing rock, and then the waves are rushing impossibly up, impossibly near. He stands there gaping like an idiot, as useless as he was on the day a man appeared from thin air to shove a sword through Jessamine. The water rushes in.

It doesn't catch him. The stones of the prison fall, cutting him off from water, light, and air. Corvo falls with them.

Dunwall sinks beneath the waves.

* * *

The sound of dripping water lulls him back to consciousness.

There is no light, but there is air, from somewhere. Corvo has a great deal of time to try to figure out where it is coming from; there is nothing else to occupy him. The water is the only sound: it forms, one drop at a time, on a tip of rock some four feet from the bottom of his little cave. The roof of his cavern is a foot or so above it. There is some loose rubble, which he shifts about vainly, but eventually his fingers cannot budge anything more.

Time passes. Out of desperate desire to focus his thoughts somewhere, anywhere, Corvo counts his own heartbeats to keep track of the time. He does not attempt to do exercises, as he had in prison. His hands will not permit him, after that last round, and he doesn't have the room, anyway.

At some point, he knows he loses track. The pattern of counting shifts to second place in his mind and instead his thoughts fill with blood and unspoken promises. He comes back to himself to find hunger has clawed it's way into his insides, and he thinks grimly of how he'd vomited his last meal up not long after the torturer brought out the metal pins. He exercises his hands to keep the hunger at bay, trading one pain for another, but no matter how many times he starts over, he knows he is losing it. He counts—one day, ten days, two weeks—Jessamine's voice, _you'll know what to do_ —and he knows it can't be right, and starts over. The water drips once every seventy-seven heartbeats. He would be dead, if it had been that long.

* * *

There are voices in the dark.

They come and go without warning. During his more lucid moments he knows they are to be expected. Sometimes the darkness vanishes entirely, and he is back on the ship pulling away from the Tower, Jessamine's last kiss lingering on his lips. Emily is laughing as he swings her through the air, Emily smiling, hiding, screaming. Emily writes him a letter in a bottle and tosses it in the sea. It floats down the Corvo's little cavern and drips out one drop at a time, but no matter how hard he tries the ink won't form a picture. It is too much like blood, and then he is choking on it, drowning as it rushes up the steps of the gazebo and into his hole in the earth, climbing up over his skin, and there is no room for him to get away, in this cell where they have shackled him, no room—

He curls into himself, sobbing, because she is not there to be held.

No one is.

* * *

He resolved that Coldridge would not break him, and he will not let this new prison break him, either. It may kill him. Burrows had sworn as much in his snake-like voice, and once the first mindless shock had faded he'd come to understand that he had likely missed his best shot at the man responsible for Jessamine's death. So be it: the expectation of death does not release him from his duty, from the desperate hope that is Emily, Emily, Emily. They took her, so they will keep her alive. Burrows will need her.

But if she died in the quake—

She didn't.

If the plague—

No.

The rats—

When he isn't there to protect her—

No. No.

When he is useless—

Dying, by degrees. Trapped.

No. No.

_Yes._

No. Someone will come. He has promises to keep, a little girl to save, an Empress to avenge.

A reckoning will not be postponed indefinitely.

* * *

No one comes.

He has lost track of the number of times that he has lost track of time. Reason tells him it might only be days; his broken and fragmented count insists seven months, seven days, seven hours, no matter how often he adds it back up. The hunger gnaws a hole in his belly, an ache that spreads outward as his body devours itself, long past time. When he is done, he listens to the slow drip of water. When he is mad, he listens to Emily, to Burrows, to Jessamine's last request, unfulfilled.

When he dreams it is of whalesong. Or perhaps that is when he is awake. He and his prison fell for some time, he knows that; perhaps even below the ocean, when the water rushed in. Perhaps the great leviathans swim above him, now.

Corvo presses bloody palms to the rock and dreams of his teeth tearing into raw, blubbery meat.

* * *

And if there comes a day when he cannot think of Jessamine, cannot think of Emily, cannot think of anything but the hunger—

He is the only witness present, and he does not remember.

No one does.

No one else is here.

No one lays a hand upon his fevered brow, bushes lank hair away from his face, cups his cheek. No one murmurs, "Oh, my dear."

No one is there to embrace him, and rock him as he sobs, shuddering, no water to spare for tears.

* * *

He dreams of Jessamine. Of Emily. Of plump soft flesh. He bites his arm to muffle his screams, muffle the false confession trying to claw it's way up his throat. He gnaws it down to the bone, and it becomes the arm of a guardsman Corvo knew, devoured by the rats, and then it becomes Burrows, and Corvo feeds him to them gladly, and when they have taken their fill, then, _then_ he feasts.

They take their fill of him too, in the end. They do. He grabs for stinking furry bodies and feels their teeth sinking into muscle, into bone, and no matter how fast he devours them it is not enough. It is not enough.

He is devoured. Devouring. Consumed.

* * *

He wakes and he has lost track again. Seven months. Seven. But that is too long. He would be dead long ago, if it had been that long.

Oh, but he is hungry enough, to have been starving for seven months.

* * *

The dripping grows faster. He laps up each drop. Sometimes it tastes of the sea, cold and metallic; sometimes it tastes of the blood in his mouth, warm and rich. He scratches at the walls, and no one scratches back. A strange energy has come upon him. He dreams of a crack in the roof, pouring out light instead of water, a dim glow that is as blinding as the sun. He could sit here and let it dissolve him. There is a silhouette in the light, an innocent face saying innocent words, words he can no longer understand.

Emily, he thinks, and her name is like a beacon in the dark. For the dark. Reality asserts itself. There is a crack in the roof. There is a rat peering down at him, chittering things that, in his madness, sound like words. It is doubtless carrying plague.

Perhaps there will be a swarm of them. Corvo's mouth waters. He is _so_ hungry.

He pounces.


	2. Daud

The Knife of Dunwall has seen a city fall before. ( _The_ knife has seen several.) He's heard the wings of bats, seen the swarms blot out the sun. What should it matter that he is the cause, now? The Masters would have had Dunwall one way or another. The Empire painted a target on its capital the moment it proclaimed its own might. Cities rise; cities fall. Nothing has changed.

And yet—and yet.

Five hundred years since he turned his back, forsook a quest that would have had him forsake all else. Five hundred years of blood that he did not yearn to taste, of lives ended by his blade for coin instead of madness. Five hundred years to carve his mark on history, one that doesn't look like the half-finished sigils adorning his hand. Five hundred years to stare into the Sun, with the taste of apples lingering in his mouth. Sweet. Fresh. Fulfilling.

The back of his hand itches. Beneath his glove, the old scars have begun once more to weep.

Was it the look in her eyes as she died? The devastation on the bodyguard's face? Or was it the screams of the Stolen Heir, as his Faithful Second spirited her away? Surely not. The Knife has done worse than murder a mother and steal a child.

But he's never murdered an Empress before.

Six months in the dark, and he hasn't once returned to the surface. His Whalers are growing restless. He can't think of how to tell them that he cannot open up the flask: all it tastes of now is ashes.

So he tells no one, and no one is there to laugh at him.

* * *

There's a woman leaning out a window, screaming at passers-by. A brave or ignorant few jeer back at her, but most hurry silently past. A few months ago rocks would have been thrown, the Watch called, protests made about the plague-mad being allowed to live in good neighbourhoods. But this woman is screaming about hunger and the devouring swarms, and Dunwall is beginning to learn what that signifies.

Only beginning. The Knife has a vaster depth of experience, and doesn't bother altering his path to avoid her rooftop. There's no point to avoiding Seekers; they're mainly dangerous to themselves and their dearest companions. It's those who have turned away from the Path that the Knife is wary of; those who have let themselves be devoured and then crawled back to life, or a semblance of it. The ones who have seen those icy Northern gates and then said, _No_ : those few are to be most dreaded.

The Knife knows this well. He's stood shivering in front of those sepulchral statues, and he turned aside from the thing that consumed him. It left him empty, echoing. He turned everything he'd learned of the Red Science to more prosaic ends, and in years amassed a fortune sufficient to buy him a single cask of the one thing that might fulfill him. Now at the last it is failing him, and leaving him wondering what the hell he's really been doing all this time since. Did it ever truly fix anything?

The only person he has to ask is madder than the screaming woman, and far more dangerous.

"Dearie, dearie. Is that you? My, such a long time it's been since you visited your old Granny."

He wasn't surprised to learn that Granny Rags was already at home in the watery, shuffled streets of the Fifth city. He is perhaps a bit disappointed. Were all the world as tilted as he has become, he could pretend it was just the world, and not himself.

"I have a question," he tells her, eyeing the rats at her feet. They are Dunwall rats, not Ratus Faber. Like Granny, madder and more dangerous.

"Of course, dear one. You only have to ask. Granny will tell you. You've felt it too, haven't you? My empty-eyed groom. His gaze is shifting."

"Not back to me," he grits out.

She tuts. This is where they differ—for all that he wishes it were more than just this. She regrets that she turned back; has spent an abyss of time since searching for an alternate door. He knows what rituals she conducted in the Fourth City, full of blood and gleaming ivory. He assisted her in some, when he was young and stupid. It was only once they shared the same loss that she warmed to him, oddly enough.

"Who can predict the Unterzee, dear? But we'll see soon enough. You won't mind doing me a few favors while we wait, will you? I need a hand with my grocery shopping, and you're a strapping young lad. I'm sure it would be no trouble for you at all."

Hah. "I'm in a hurry."

"Yes, yes. Granny knows. Your time is running out, isn't it. Your story almost told."

A cryptic clue, barely worth tuppence at market. Certainly bound in guile and betrayal. Seekers are dangerous to their confidantes, most dangerous to themselves: the most painful twist of the knife is to convince another to walk the Path behind you. Granny Rags has betrayed many.

He should sit and wait for this something, this whatever-it-is, to come to him. Refuse to play. Should, should.

"Give me your list."


End file.
